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Chocolate Spice Gingerbread

Wonderful progress – we decided that I was feeling well enough to brave the 3 hour car journey down to my boyfriend’s mum’s house in Dorset. It also coincided with Mother’s Day, so OBVIOUSLY I needed to bake something to take with us.

Not the easiest ask though; my mother-not-in-law is a most accomplished baker herself, so I felt under pressure to produce something impressive. Or, at the very least, more edible than the weirdly-not-savoury-or-sweet cheddar cheese and apple tart I ‘treated’ her to a while ago. I have yet to live that down.

One thing I know that she loves is Green & Black’s dark chocolate, so I was delighted to find that they actually have some recipes on their website. I chose the Chocolate Spice Gingerbread as I thought it could be a multipurpose tea or dessert type thing (subtext: I wanted to eat it).

How it was to make:

Don’t dive into the butter, little man!

I think that the hardest thing about making this was trying not to drink the melted chocolate/butter/treacle concoction.

Other than that it was very straightforward – melting the butter = no creaming!! I think I could compile a great cookbook of non-creaming-butter-and-sugar recipes (for the poorly/lazy baker).

Notice in the video I don’t have any help. Not by choice really, my boyfriend was out. Hence not being able to lift the bowl up and pour the batter into the tin!

How it came out:

Not sunken at all!

YUM. Somehow I managed not to over OR under bake this!

It was really richly flavoured, but the texture was very light and airy so it wasn’t too much – think a much lighter version of a brownie.

‘Gingerbread’ here is more the loaf type than the “Not my gumdrop buttons!” type. Brilliant with a cuppa.

The little prune bits were great and added a bit of interest.

And the verdict was… she liked them! A triumph! She also suggested that they might be nice with apricots instead of the prunes, which I think would work very well indeed. Perhaps also some walnut chunks would be good in them. I might just need to make them again and see…

Personal Progress:

Baking lessons learnt:

If you drink the mixture while you’re cooking then you won’t have enough for the recipe.

A challenge to leave un-drunk

Physical progress:

As I said before, I followed my apron’s mantra literally – before doing this I had baked the Courgette and Chive Muffins and then had a sleep.

Mixing was ok, although you can see I needed to switch to my left arm at some point (and my left arm is completely useless, so this helped me about 0%).

Still can’t pick up a bowl full of mixture on my own. But spooning it across was equally effective, if slower!

DJ Dan Browne has provided the soundtrack to many of my favourite nights out over the past 10 years or so (especially in the now extinct Mamilanji’s – remember that?!). I’ve always loved his Summer mixes, so I channeled some Summer 2014 happiness for this bake.